Climate Change

Climate change is when the overall average temperature of the earth increases because of an increase in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon. The greenhouse gases should be able to escape the atmosphere at a rate fast enough where the temperature can stay at a consistent rate. But since there is so much carbon building up, its building up too fast for it to escape at the same rate.

We are experiencing this climate change today because so much carbon is being released into the atmosphere as more and more fossil fuels are burned without enough time for the atmosphere to release all of it. An increase in industrialization for the past decades, for example was a major contributor to the increase in carbon as well as cars.

As we've been learning about climate change, it's helped me to understand how it can affect everything around me, even my own eco-site. Climate change can affect my site in the future by causing the ecosystem to change dramatically. Animals rely on certain climate patterns in order to create a habitable shelter and to have the needed food to survive. However, if the climate changes drastically enough in the future, the same plants that are growing in these conditions now won't be able to thrive, pushing away all the animals that rely on them along with many of their own predators as well. It will cause a trophic cascade that will force organisms that can no longer survive in that climate to move. Possibly, some animals may even develop new traits and adapt to the new climate conditions so that they can continue living there.

As I learned in the podcast The Tribe that’s Moving Earth and Water to Solve the Climate Crisis, in Native American culture, they truly value the well-being of the environment, as it makes up a major part of their belief system. They know a lot of things about the environment and how to not only coexist with nature, but to also help nature while getting what we need as humans. So one way to mitigate climate change is by governments implementing some of the same things Native Americans do to help the environment, such as controlled burns and reversing the changes done the the structure of rivers that destroy some animals' homes.